L'effetto mancato della riforma maggioritaria: il voto strategico

The goal of this essay is to investigate the strategic electoral behaviour of Italian voters in both the 1994 and 1996 elections and its effects on the restructuring party system. The idea of people voting strategically has been discussed in the literature for many years. In the context of the consequences of electoral systems, the term strategic voting is usually used to describe the district-by district phenomenon of third party supporters under the plurality rule voting for one of the two major parties in their single-member districts. This is due to the tendency of such electoral systems to discourage voters from wasting their vote (minor parties are in fact sistematically underrepresented). As a consequence, “winner-take-all” electoral laws tend to produce two-party systems, but only if the two major parties are the same in every constituency. On this theoretical basis, the Italian electoral reform of 1993 with the introduction of a prevailing majoritarian system was expected to offer new incentives toward strategic voting in the single-member districts and therefore toward a bipolarization of the party system, provided that the pattern of competition was the same nationwide. However, empirical tests based on district-level data show that strategic voting has not significantly occurred either in 1994 or in 1996 elections. The heritage of the old proportional electoral system, a tardy learning process of the new rules, the persistence of ideological voting and also the contradictory incentives deriving from the mixed proportional and majoritarian nature of the new electoral system (especially for the Senate) are all reasons for the lack of strategic voting. Nevertheless, the Italian party system that has been emerging out of the electoral transition show a bipolar tendency. In other words, party elites have successfully negotiated appropriate coalitions at the system level avoiding the building of implicit coalition arranged at the district level by strategic decisions of voters.